The name of God

I believe in God, Her name is Mother Nature.

6 comments:

Psiloiordinary said...

More sexism in the name of religion?

Cliff Martin said...

As to gender ... Congratulations, you're half way to full-blown theism!

As to appellation ... Likewise. You’ve acknowledged immanence. Add preeminence and transcendence, and you’ll have the whole picture!

(smile)

Psiloiordinary said...

Wouldn't that be Deism Cliff?

I thought Theism mean't a personal god and a holy book and magic etc.

Genuine question - not sure.

Cliff Martin said...

Psi, I’m not sure I understand your question. If God is merely transcendent, distant, dispassionate, he would surely be the God of the deist. But if he is transcendent and immanent, (“God is all and in all”) then he is the God of the theist. This is a standard Christian theological understanding.

My views on randomness (randomness by God’s design, a tool in his hand) often lead people to accuse me of Deism. I have responded to that on my blog site. But I do not see how you construe Deism out of my tongue-in-cheek comment here. ??

Psiloiordinary said...

Hi Cliff,

I guess I am just showing off my ignorance.

I thought deism meant no involvement in the universe apart form the initial snap of the fingers/rainbow.

Sort of like god is mother nature as Tom had said.

Happy to be corrected.

Owl said...

Now my ignorance comes into play: I thought maybe Jefferson was the kind of Deist that put God outside of the whole cosmos.

As for good ol' Momma Earth, the Gaia thing was, I think, a pantheistic conception of God.

I know the apostle Paul says, "They worship and serve the creature more than the creator..." That suggests, to many theists, pantheism.

However, Jesus affirms that "God is a Spirit." So it can be postulated that a spirit hath no gender.

The ancients tended to believe in an adrogynous deity. Maybe they had something. Jesus referred to God as "Father", obviously suggesting gender, but might it be a bit deeper than this? He created both man and woman in his image. Go figure.

There are some verses in the Hebrew scriptures that anthropomorphize God with feminine characteristics, but I don't know them off the top of my head.

But the feminine characteristics do seem evident in God: his love of beauty, his compassion, concern for children, mercy, ect., ect. Makes me think, too, that maybe the Jews did not make as big a deal about God's masculinity as some of the Christians later did.

One last food-for-thought thingy: if Jesus was God in flesh, he did choose to come in a male body. And I know this opens a can of worms sometimes.

But don't women tend to balance the men out, complement them? Might that be a clue to God's nature: that it is balanced?